2011-12 :: Extensions

Extensions

Where do phenomena end? Where do our theories about phenomena begin? This year’s Technoscience Salon explores the uncontainability of phenomena and the gaps, fissures and possibilities latent in contemporary accounts of extensive processes.

How are phenomena turned into objects and made extensive through space and time? At stake in our discussions is a range of extensive phenomena and processes that we can’t live without: our ecologies, economies, atmospheres, archives, metabolisms, genealogies, networks, algorithms, and distribution systems. We are interested in the architectures and temporalities of these extensive things and processes.

Our aim is to examine what is at stake in the work of extending things in the interdigitating realms of technoscience, art, economics, and politics. Simultaneously we want to hold our own praxis in focus, by examining the labours of historians, anthropologists, geographers and others who track the extension of objects into worlds and worlds into objects. How do our theories conceal extensive relations? What theoretical and methodological shifts can we employ to illuminate otherwise invisible distributions? What are our habits for tracking extensions, and what do our habits take for granted?

The 2011-12 Salon invites participants to query the ontological politics of extensive processes, and to think together anew about how our theories and methods participate in contouring some worlds, if not others.